This Is All (84 page)

‘No?’ he says.

I shake my head again.

‘Thought you was hungry?’

I huddle into myself.

He huffs and shrugs and goes back to the table, where he stands, eating and drinking, chewing loudly with his mouth open. He looks at me all the time.

I know from the way he’s ogling me there’s no hope of distracting him any longer. When he’s finished scoffing he’ll do what he’s intended to do all along. How could I have thought he wanted anything else?

My mouth tastes vile. My stomach hurts from being clenched tight for so long. My body is tense but floppy. I feel so weak I don’t think I can stand.

I lower my head and go inside myself and divide into two: the one sitting on the bed who Cal is leering at and wants and is not me; and the one who is not on the bed, who he cannot reach or hurt and is me. Whatever he does to the one on the bed will have nothing to do with the real me.

He finishes eating, wipes his hands on his jeans, and comes to me again. He stands in front of me, staring. Then reaches out and pushes the duvet off my shoulders, baring me to the waist. I hold the duvet tight across my lap.

He strokes my shoulders. His hands are sticky and rough and hot and stink of burger. He bends over me, unhooks my bra and takes it off. My arms resist but he pushes them aside. He stuffs my bra into a pocket of his jeans and stares at my breasts.

He reaches out and fingers the nipples.

‘Stand,’ he says.

I can’t move.

He takes me under the arms and lifts me up. The duvet falls to the ground. He takes his hands away. My legs buckle. He lets me slump back onto the bed. I cross my arms over my breasts.

He grips the top of my briefs and drags them off, puts them to his face and smells the crotch, inhaling deeply, his eyes closed. When he’s had enough, he puts them in the other pocket of his jeans. He’s smirking with pleasure.

He kneels down, pushes my knees apart, puts his head between my legs, and licks.

I turn my head and look through the window. The moon is still there but crossed now by clouds. I remember the poem Izumi wrote in the anthology she gave me the day we became friends. I recite it to myself.

An ocean of clouds

rolls in waves across the sky,

carrying the moon

like a boat that disappears

into a thicket of stars.

Without stopping his tongue, Cal reaches for my hands and places them on his head. He wants me to stroke his hair. But my hands are frozen into claws.

I’m numb. My mind is blank. My eyes hold onto the moon, riding the clouds.

Time means nothing any more.

Cal stands. I hear him undressing, tearing off his boots,
thump thump
, and his clothes.

He takes my head in his hands and turns it to face him. His erect penis is a breath away.

‘Open,’ he says.

I can’t.

‘Open your fucking mouth.’

I won’t.

He presses the tip of his engorged penis against my clamped lips. Draws it back and presses it again, harder. And again.

‘Suck me.’

I turn my eyes to look up at his. I find only now that I’m weeping. But I am not weeping, because the one who is weeping is not me. I am not here.

He takes a step back.

His penis shrivels.

He’s surprised. Takes hold of it. Looks at it, disbelieving. Tries to make it grow again with his hand. But it won’t. He looks desperate.

‘Lie down.’

I don’t move.

He puts his hands under my knees and lifts them so that I’m forced to lie on my back with my bent legs in the air.

He tries to enter me but can’t. His penis remains slack. He attempts to rouse it with his hand while holding my breast with the other hand. But fails.

He pushes my legs down, pulls me to a sitting position again, stands close, and says, ‘You do it.’

I can’t move.

He takes my right hand and holds it around his penis.

Nothing happens.

‘Shag me,’ he says.

I’m still weeping, without making a sound.

He wraps his hand over mine and masturbates. But his penis doesn’t respond.

He releases my hand and stands back. I see the frustration gathering in him till it breaks out in a tortured howl, like an animal in pain.

He turns from me and rushes about, laying hands on anything he can, throwing it at the wall. He overturns the table, his naked body a whirl of anger, before returning to me when he can find nothing else to assault, panting, wild-eyed.

I expect him to attack me now, but he doesn’t. He stops in front of me, his hands clasped behind his head, and yells, ‘Help me! Why won’t you help me? I love you. Help me!’

He isn’t ordering, but pleading.

Now I know what it is that the calm core of me has decided. I know what I must do.

>>
Rescue
>>

Question

Everything.

Reading

I live to read.

Rescue

While I’m cycling to the tree, Arry wakes and senses at once that something is wrong. The sounds of the day aren’t right, the house is too quiet. He checks his watch. Ten forty-five. He goes downstairs and finds a note from Doris on the kitchen table:
We’re shopping. Cordelia’s gone for a cycle ride
.

The note reassures him. He puts his unease down to a minor hangover and an incident that’s still upsetting him. As he left home last night he came across Cal sitting in his van parked a few doors down from our house. Cal said he’d just arrived, on his way to ask Arry out for a drink. Arry
explained that he was meeting some of his gay friends. Cal drove him there. On the way Arry teased Cal, saying he wasn’t really coming for Arry but to see me, because he knew Cal fancied me. Cal said no, it was Arry he’d come for, but, yes, he’d quite like a chance with me. Arry said he didn’t have a hope because I was way out of Cal’s class. Why would I want a great baboon like Cal when I could have the pick of the pack from school? Cal didn’t think this funny and took the huff. Arry tried to josh him out of it, saying he was just pulling Cal’s leg. But he realised then that Cal had something more serious than just the hots for me. To try and placate him, Arry invited Cal to join him and his friends, but Cal said he hated poofs, they were only queer because they couldn’t get it up with a woman, they were losers, weaklings, crap merchants. Me as well? Arry asked, trying to make light of it. You more than any of them, Cal snarled. Poor Cal, he’s lovesick and frustrated, Arry thought, trying to pass the insult off as nothing worse than a bad-tempered outburst. But he was upset by it, and the bad feeling lingered through a randy evening with his friends and after he got home about four, and woke with him in the morning.

Doris and Dad return from shopping. Arry helps them stow things away, and helps Dad repair a broken cupboard door. They have our usual Saturday lunch: fresh bread, cheese, tomatoes and dates, with a glass of beer or wine. In the afternoon he does his week’s laundry, listens to music, reads his book about Joshua Slocum’s voyage alone around the world, and falls asleep.

He wakes at six feeling uneasy again. He listens, expecting to hear me in my room. Nothing. He knocks three times on the wall. No reply. He goes downstairs. Dad’s in the sitting room, working on his laptop. Doris is in the kitchen, preparing the supper.

He asks Doris if I’m back yet. She says no. Shouldn’t I be, it’s after dark? Probably gone to Julie’s, Doris says. You know
how they are, they’ll have got talking and forgotten the time.

Arry calls my mobile. No answer. He leaves a voice message and texts: r u ok? He phones Julie. Her answerphone is on. He leaves a message, asking her to call if I’m with her.

Maybe she’s on her way, Doris says. Give her another hour.

But an hour later I’m still not home. Arry tries my mobile again. Nothing.

A few minutes later, Julie calls. Is something wrong? Doris explains. Julie says no, I’m not with her, she hasn’t seen me all day, she’ll call if she hears from me.

They try to eat supper, but aren’t hungry, and drink only water in case they have to go somewhere urgently. They discuss calling the police and the hospitals but decide it’s too soon.

Another hour passes. Julie calls again to see if they’ve heard anything. Now she’s worried as well.

At Arry’s suggestion they go to my room to see if there’s anything that might give a clue to where I’ve gone. At first they find nothing. They discuss checking my laptop and notebooks, but decide against it. They know I’m sensitive about my privacy.

It’s Doris who thinks of looking through my wastebasket. She finds the bits of tin I discarded while making the plaque for the tree. Why would I cut up a tin of beans?

Wait! Arry says, rushing straight to the cupboard in his room where he keeps his climbing gear. His gloves and hammer are missing. He explains to D&D about the tree, our climb, the plaques, and why I might have gone back there to climb it on my own.

O god! Doris says. She’s fallen and hurt herself and can’t move.

Dad is always at his best in a crisis, it seems to concentrate his mind and focus his energy like nothing else – he loves it when he’s travelling and things go wrong – though it also turns him into a mini Napoleon. In minutes he has organised
them. Doris is to stay at home in case I return or phone. Arry is to go with Dad to the tree. They’ll call Doris from there. If they don’t find me, Doris will call the police to report me missing and the hospitals to check on accident victims. He instructs Doris to pack a bag with some of my clean clothes, Arry to collect a blanket, water and food, while he puts together a first-aid kit, including a couple of heavy-duty torches.

As soon as this is done, Dad and Arry set off. On the way Dad makes Arry go through the whole story of our tree climb again.

When they arrive, they park where Cal parked the day we climbed together. The moon is out and bright, which helps, but they are glad of their strong torches as they hurry down the path, which is wet and slippy after the heavy downpour earlier. They find no sign of me by the tree. Dad is about to call Doris when Arry says, no, wait, let’s make sure. He asks Dad to make a back so that he can climb onto his shoulders and reach the first branch. He scales the tree, and, as he expects, finds my second plaque nailed under the other two. He calls down that I’ve been there.

On the way to the car they decide not to call Doris till they’ve discussed possibilities. More panic, Dad says, less clarity. Maybe, Arry says, she had an accident on the way home, a car knocked her off her bike or something, and now she’s in a hospital somewhere. If so, Dad says, the police would have been called and they or the ambulance people or the hospital staff would have identified her from the things in her bag and contacted home. But what, Arry says, if a hit-and-run driver has knocked her down and she’s unconscious in a ditch? Or maybe, Dad says, as they arrive at the car, maybe some psycho sex maniac has taken her.

It’s now that Arry allows himself to wonder about Cal and the hint he’d ignored the night before that Cal hadn’t just arrived but had been there for some time and was lying
about it. Cal was hot for me, and he knew about the tree.

Arry mentions this to Dad and they look at each other with that sinking feeling you get when a truth has been spoken that you don’t want to face.

I’d better call Doris, Dad says, and get her onto the police and the hospitals.

Which he does, without mentioning Cal, because, he explains to Arry when he’s rung off, they’ve no evidence that Cal has done anything, and it’s a bit off to accuse him for no other reason than he’s a dodgy character.

So how can we make sure? Arry asks.

Any way you can find out where he is?

How? He’s a loner, lives in a van, could be anywhere.

No one he talks to? Relies on? Someone who helps him, and might know? He’s bound to have regular places where he parks. Even down-and-outs do that.

The only person Arry can think of is the old guy Cal works with on the bins.

Know his name?

Yes.

Where he lives?

Roughly. But not the street or house.

Enough to get a phone number. Call Doris. Ask her to look through the phone book. See if she can locate him. Call her mobile, she’ll be using the landline to phone the hospitals. When you’ve done that give her to me.

It takes only a couple of minutes to find the old man’s number. Dad asks Doris about progress. She’s reported me missing to the police but they say there’s not much they can do. Thousands of people go missing every year. People over sixteen are considered adult and therefore independent. All the police can do is put my name on the missing persons list and ask the local police to keep an eye out for me. Can’t they do more than that? Not unless there’s evidence of foul play, abduction, murder, something serious like that. As for
hospitals, nothing so far. Keep trying, Dad says. He still doesn’t mention Cal.

Arry phones the bin man. Does he know where Cal might be? At first the old man says no, but Arry presses him, saying it’s about money he owes Cal and something important for Cal’s future. The old man suggests a disused barn where he thinks Cal’s been hanging out lately, but doesn’t want anyone to know in case he’s turfed out. The old man isn’t sure exactly where it is, but tells Arry what he knows.

Dad and Arry search the map for possible places in the area mentioned by the old man. They find five and set off for the nearest.

It takes two hours to check the first three. Between each they call Doris, but no news. Doris wants to know what they’re doing. Not wanting to alarm her, Dad says they’re searching possible routes I might have taken to and from the tree. During the second call Doris tells them that Julie phoned again and has come over so that they can support each other, as they’re both sick with worry.

It’s after midnight when Dad and Arry set off for the fourth place on their list.